Perfection takes time: Spy Party dev on new additions, waiting ’til it’s right

Chris Hecker worked solo on Spy Party for more than 3 years, beta goes public soon.

When Chris Hecker talks about Spy Party, the video game he has been making almost entirely by himself for over three years, he likes to use the word “perfect.” Based on a 30-minute conversation from his office in Oakland last week, he runs at approximately 26 PPH (“perfects” per hour).

After being pressed by e-mail about his affinity for the word—especially when used to describe an admittedly unfinished game like Spy Party—the excitable ex-Maxis developer almost immediately responds with a URL: his full name, forward slash, perfectionist. That page, with a 2007 timestamp, hides a cheeky, less confident quote: “I went to a therapist once, and said, 'I feel like I'm an incompetent perfectionist.' He replied, 'There is no other kind.'”

Indeed, Hecker issues nearly as many asterisks as he does p-words, about both the game (“totally ugly,” “Sims 1-esque art”) and himself (“hard to work with,” “control freak,” “totally fucking insane”), while making sense of Spy Party at a midway point in its development. Not his words, not by a long shot; Hecker's best time estimate, tucked into a nervous laugh, is “before I run out of money or die.”

But this week, the ambitious, asymmetrical, online psychological battle game makes a definitive “we're getting there” statement. New duds. Swagger. The tunnel-vision confidence needed to pull off such an odd game. Oh, and another full-time employee, officially doubling Spy Party's development roster.

Today, Jon Cimino, another ex-Maxis staffer, has unveiled his work as Spy Party's new art director. His first images re-imagine the caricatured likes of Morgan Freeman, Theodore Roosevelt, and Helen Mirren as expressive, figurine-like dinner guests.

Dev Chris Hecker (standing) hired his former colleague John Cimino (sitting), after working together on Spore.

Chris Hecker

It's an important upgrade for a two-player game that revolves around subtle visual cues. Spy Party, for the uninitiated, pits a party-going spy against a sniper. In the game's current default mode, the spy must fit in among computer-controlled guests, all while accomplishing three simple tasks, without outing him or herself as the human. The sniper must carefully examine the room while minding blind spots to pick the spy out within a five-minute time limit.

That the game has been so playable, tense, and competitive thus far may be a testament to Hecker's perfectionist streak from the get-go. But if the game forces players to stare at each other again and again, it has to shape up.

“The game has been so ugly for so long because I've been 100 percent focused on the deep, competitive gameplay,” Hecker says, but much of the game's foundation has been solidified by a thousands-strong closed beta test—which has been crucial for a game about competition and asymmetrical roles. Thus, he and Cimino are ready to make its looks meet his ridiculous expectations. One of those is timelessness, as Hecker desperately wants to avoid the pitfalls of a “spy” game sticking to the '60s. Fashion magazine cutouts and cues from films like The Incredibles have guided their vision, and the topic brings out Hecker's indie obsessiveness.

“Look at the art John is getting to do,” Hecker says. “There's no other game—he'd be working on orcs or space marines at another company. There aren't other games about stylish people. Humans doing human things. There's The Sims, obviously, but The Sims has to be all things to all people. It has genericness to its art style. It's stylized, but they very carefully pick that super-generic look.”

Hecker says he spent three years wooing Cimino to his cause, pointing to the duo's working relationship while at Maxis: “John worked with my incredibly insane broken animation system and character texturing systems, all the stuff that made the characters in Spore. That stuff was procedural, experimental craziness, which barely worked, and he did great with it.”

Otherwise, Hecker insists that he'd rather work alone on everything from connectivity code to authentication servers to even the ways users log in to the game and its forums simultaneously, no matter how much time every little task adds to the total job. “It sounds crazy,” Hecker says, but he believes his crazy work ethic for Spy Party has resulted in “deep satisfaction.”

“When I control every variable and make [Spy Party] come out exactly the way I want, it just feels artistically like the right thing for me. There's this level of 'it's taking forever' that people tend to focus on, but I don't have any of the stress that I had when I was on Spore, for example, or larger projects where I can't control all of this stuff. Back then, it wasn't a [mental] bandwidth problem. It was just, 'hey, you can't,' or 'that's gonna be crappy, sorry.' I refused to do that on this game. I'm willing to take the time.”

Hecker is taking today's new concept art—and the current beta, whose party guests still look like Dreamcast-era runts—to this week's Penny Arcade Expo with designs on opening up the game's paid public beta within weeks. Like Minecraft, an initial $15 gets players into the beta, then promises those players a free copy of the final version. Intriguingly, Hecker most looks forward to a new wave of cash-wielding beta participants so that he can take even longer to finish making Spy Party.

After discussing a recent feature delay with beta users, “The comments were, 'dude, take your time, we want it to be great,'” Hecker says. “Players love this. It's such a change to have someone take a game really personally—try to make it perfect—as opposed to, 'it's gotta ship by August 18 and here are the compromises.'”

Perfection takes time, Hecker says, especially with a self-produced indie game—and based on his comments about working with big companies and his vision of a “perfect jewel” game, that's how Spy Party will have to be. As of right now, the only time limit on Hecker's mind is roughly nine years.

“I'm still burning through my savings right now, both paying John and keeping the lights on,” Hecker says, before expressing his relief about an upcoming wave of paying beta users. “I probably won't be able to build my daughter's college fund for a while, but at least it won't be decimated.”

I can't decide if this is a blog post or a wank-the-indie-dev post. Possibly both. Only one paragraph describing the game at the highest level. I have no idea what the game plays like (or is supposed to) or why I would be interested in playing it. I do know that the lead developer has an obsessive streak and that he's strapped for cash. Not sure, but that doesn't make me too hopeful about the game as a whole.

This doesn't even qualify as a "get me interested" preview of the game. Can we get a follow-up that looks at the game and tries to deliver some substance?

All this build-up, along with the talk of, "The developer is an obsessive control freak bent on doing everything himself" really reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. Well, except DNF had a terrific first version that they were trying to follow up on.

I've heard about this game before, a year or two ago. The gameplay concept intrigued me, but not enough to remember it. I feel it has a lot more to prove before a lot of people will start paying for it.

Blah. I was really psyched about this game and have been following it off-and-on for a long time, but I don't think I'd pay for beta access. The game itself doesn't seem like something I'd spend more than fifteen bucks or so on to begin with, as unique as it is.

Loving the new art style, though - is that a Vincent Price analogue I spy up there? Even decades after his death Mr. Price manages to be one hell of a smooth, suave gent.

And yeah, so what is this game about? Your goal is to fool another person into thinking that you're one of the computer characters, so he doesn't shoot you? Sounds like a fun mini-game, but not something I'd find interesting for very long. I'd pay $15 for the finished game, but nothing more if that's the entire point of the game.

So, I totally don't see why this is a front page article... press release on an unpublished game... no gameplay... from a new developer. So, aren't there about 1000 crash and burn games like this a year?

@krimhorn and others: Hi, author here. Spy Party's gameplay has been written about ad nauseum at tech and gaming sites since 2009--though, admittedly, not at Ars--and as such, I focused my limited word count on the middle-ground state of the game. I debated putting the "how does this game work" graf a little higher in the article, but that would have refocused the entire article's energy on what I considered a redundant game tutorial.

If this "reverse turing test" type gameplay appeals to you then do yourself a favor and grab 3 friends, get together with an XBox 360, spend $1 on Hidden In Plain Sight and enjoy short, tense games that end in both yells of joy and agony at the same time. The catch is local multiplayer only but I think that actually makes it even more fun.

I don't see how the gameplay as described by the snippet could last too long. People are going to figure out the patterns the bots use and look for anything that doesn't follow one of their patterns. I guess the gameplay will be trying to follow the behavior of a bot to the letter, but something as simple as a tiny bit of lag that causes you to stand slightly too close to a model for a fraction of a second could be a dead giveaway.

@krimhorn and others: Hi, author here. Spy Party's gameplay has been written about ad nauseum at tech and gaming sites since 2009--though, admittedly, not at Ars--and as such, I focused my limited word count on the middle-ground state of the game. I debated putting the "how does this game work" graf a little higher in the article, but that would have refocused the entire article's energy on what I considered a redundant game tutorial.

Author? Need the OrbitalHQ to verify that, but I'll take you at your word.

Explaining the mechanics of a game isn't a "redundant game tutorial" it's kinda the essence of a video game. It's especially important to explain the mechanics (the level of detail dependent on the novelty thereof) for games that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers. There are quite a few of us who don't really use the "other" sites for video game coverage, preferring Ars' front page and the forums to find out about new games.

I have no problem with a "Hardships of being an indie developer" story. In fact Ars has published several, good, andquality articles on this very subject.

The last link is particularly relevant to this discussion because in it Kyle essentially has this exact same type of story, but we get a bit more understanding of what kind of game Dust will be. I will grant you that Kyle probably had an easier time describing the game (Metroidvania) than you probably did, but it's there front and center.

There's nothing particularly new about indie developers having it hard. That would (maybe) have been enough for an article two or three years ago. Today it's entirely on the shoulders of the game they're making as to whether or not we should even care they're struggling. Dust sounds like the kind of game that I would pre-order to help out with. Spy Party? I have no idea.

Two players, one trying to act like an NPC while completing objectives, the other trying to identify and kill the first tells me...nothing. What tools do I have to identify/evade identification? Is it dialog based gameplay for the Spy and pure observation for the Sniper? The game sounds like it might have a novel idea behind it, but without those details the plight of the developer means pretty much nothing.

While I respect your viewpoint that its mechanics have been covered I don't want to be told "go read some other publication" (sister or not) for the details that should have been provided in the article.

@krimhorn: As both a longtime games writer and an incredibly new contributor to Ars, I appreciate your thoughts and will fight for more word count in the future to live up to expectations like yours. I had a lot I wanted to say about Spy Party, and it's heartening to know you'd have read every word of it. Next time, krimhorn. Next time.

@krimhorn: As both a longtime games writer and an incredibly new contributor to Ars, I appreciate your thoughts and will fight for more word count in the future to live up to expectations like yours. I had a lot I wanted to say about Spy Party, and it's heartening to know you'd have read every word of it. Next time, krimhorn. Next time.

Excellent. I look forward to reading more of your work.

Oh, I do want to make sure that something's clear: I thought the article was well written. It was just missing what seemed to be the most important piece of context: information on the game.

@krimhorn: I don't normally bite on adding a ton in comment threads--after all, the article was the place to do that--but I'm gonna call this a special circumstance. You want more about the game? Let's dance. Assume this was pasted in after the one graf with the game summary.

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Spy Party's conceit makes for an easy elevator pitch--spy vs. sniper? well, golly!--but Hecker, the obsessive perfectionist, has series like StarCraft and Street Fighter in his, er, sights. He wants players to antagonize over their choices and sight paths in each five-minute match, and the years-long beta has already pushed him toward important tweaks that have, so far, held up to thousands of hours of fan scrutiny. For starters, take the list of tasks. The sniper gets a list of four possible things the spy will try to pull off by the end of the round... but the spy only has to do three of them.

"Now things are starting to get interesting!" Hecker notes on the game's private forums. "Of course the Spy wouldn't have picked the Transfer Microfilm mission; it's really hard! But, wait, maybe the Spy knows the Sniper will think that, so it becomes the right mission to pick?! This is known as yomi in game design, and it's awesome."

Maps have evolved to include more blind spots. Spy tasks have been given multiple paths to completion--some of which are more likely to reveal "tells," from fumbling hand motions to sound effects. And the management of everyday items like wine glasses and wristwatches strikes an interesting balance between hiding the spy and giving him bonuses at the risk of utter exposure. (The only thing Hecker hasn't tweaked for a while is the Madden-like "tap now!" meter that pops up when attempting a task; it's an almost out-of-place twitch-reaction moment in an otherwise truly mental game.)

As the game approaches critical mass, it has a glaring caveat: thousands of words of damn-near required reading. It makes for sometimes awkward showings at public events, particularly July's EVO fighting game competitions--the home of the world's most balance-obsessed players. Hecker brought a demo kiosk along at the bequest of fighting game maven Seth Killian. The fighting fans didn't bombard Hecker with unexpected feedback or tips, but they made him hopeful about the game's impending mainstream launch nonetheless.

"There were a bunch of people who would walk by, see something that looked like The Sims running, talk a bit of trash about it with their friends, sit down to play, and say "whoa", and then come back multiple times over the show," Hecker says. "That was quite gratifying."

It makes a good first impression, even if you skip the manuals, but the required reading pays off. The mental calisthenics that play out between guessing your opponents' moves and feeling lasers hover over your head have no peer in modern gaming.

That the game has been so playable... (pick up where the article left off)

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(BTW, if I'm not the author, the author should totally pay me $1,000s for picking up where he left off

I've vaguely heard of the game before, but never read anything on it before (I don't go read whatever other sites someone was mentioning). Here's my guess as to the gameplay as I understand (please let me know if I have any of it wrong):

There's a party in a large room with a bunch of famous rich people mingling with each other. One person is randomly chosen to be a spy and and the first player then has to make that person complete 3 tasks. The other player is a sniper, which I would assume is watching through the windows with his scope. He has a larger list of things the spy might possibly attempt to do and must figure out who is doing them. Both players have a dossier on the guests at the party so they would know what their expected actions and associations would be. The spy has to use his skills to blend in and not raise suspicion while going about completing said tasks within 5 minutes, and the sniper has to decide who is acting out of character and shoot them, with immediate failure if they make the wrong decision.

A basic summary like that wouldn't have taken up too much space in the article and would have made some of the other comments about watches and cleaning glasses made much more sense.

I don't really understand why a site like Ars is so concerned about wordcount, they're not limited by the size of a piece of paper, and all the text combined is significantly less data to transmit than the oversized poster at the end.

Edit: After rereading my summary, I realized that I still don't have any frigging clue what the gameplay mechanics are. Something like that should be pretty important for an article that is trying to drum up excitement about a game.

@krimhorn: I don't normally bite on adding a ton in comment threads--after all, the article was the place to do that--but I'm gonna call this a special circumstance. You want more about the game? Let's dance. Assume this was pasted in after the one graf with the game summary.

---*more information on the game, omitted for brevity--

Seriously awesome sir. I thank you. That additional information does help in identifying some of the core constructs of the gameplay and helps put into focus what kind of issues the developer is experiencing in finishing the game. It definitely sounds interesting and I look forward to reading more from you (on this or other games).

Quote:

(BTW, if I'm not the author, the author should totally pay me $1,000s for picking up where he left off

For reals. Looking back at that it does come off more snippish than I intended. I wasn't expecting an article author to not have an account that Caesar (or Aurich, or whomever is responsible for setting the flag) didn't have the 'author flag' set on (the "New Poster" flag didn't help you either, that's not your fault though). One of the best parts of the latest site design is the badges for individuals in the comment threads that are "Contributors", "Article Author", etc.

I do apologize for how snippish parts of my first couple of posts in this thread come off as. You sir have risen above and beyond the call of duty and laid to rest my concerns about your coverage of this game. I do appreciate it and thank you for it.

I will be keeping my eyes on this one, if it comes out in the next few months/years ( ) I expect that I'll give it a spin.

Although I find it sad that the usually knowledgeable Ars' crows seems so ignorant about Spy Party, I agree that the article could have linked to the tutorial's youtube video, because that's the best way to catch up to a very original game (I've been following it for years, and considered buying the beta a few months ago, but didn't have the time to play it at that moment)

Not to pile on, but I've never heard of the game and also would have liked more information about the game itself in the initial article. Thanks for the follow up posts in the comment thread, just adding my voice to the group of people who would like more context in articles as well (the article was plenty interesting, but I don't want to have to go somewhere else to learn what the heck the game is).